It’s not abuse, it’s tough love!
So, this is controversial, but when I hear “toxic masculinity” I understand that it means that not all masculinity is toxic, but masculinity can have toxic forms. In the interest of using precise language, I do believe that, in the realm of all possibilities, there can conceivably be toxic forms of empathy.
Now, I don’t think that left/progressive ideals are toxic in general, and certainly aren’t toxic when they’re based in empathy and compassion. And I realize that the “side” that coined the phrase “toxic empathy” is also the side that thinks “toxic masculinity” is an absolute phrase. So it would make sense that right/conservative people would think “oh we’ll call ideals we don’t like toxic, like the libs do with masculinity” without any deeper understanding.
Just want to be pedantic to try to keep the capital-D Discourse on the nature of empathy from becoming black-and-white polarized.
A hypothetical “toxic empathy” could be our evolved hunting technique. We would run down prey with endurance hunting. If we lost them, we could use empathy to put ourselves in their mindset, and so predict their movements.
Even this would be “venomous empathy”. Toxic masculinity is partially defined by the way it hurts the man doing it. It’s toxic to the host. It’s misused enough however to muddy that, considerably.
Toxic empathy is when you bite them and feel bad. Venomous empathy is when they bite you and you feel bad.
The only toxic empathy I can think of is Stockholm syndrome.
In the interest of using precise language, I do believe that, in the realm of all possibilities, there can conceivably be toxic forms of empathy.
Which situations can you conceive that would be made worse by all involved parties understanding each others feelings?
Some people use the terms empathy and sympathy as two levels of understanding. Sympathy as the ability to understand how someone feels and empathy as the ability to feel the way someone else feels. In that context, empathy can be crippling and a negative trait to possess.
Couldn’t what we typically call concern trolling be a type of toxic empathy? Of course you could make an argument that concern trolling is entirely removed from empathy, but then things like toxic positivity tends to only be positive at a very surface level view.
Concern trolling is trying to hijack other people’s empathy for their own goals. It may look like empathy, but it really isn’t.
Toxic positivity, on the other hand, really is positivity, but ramped up to eleven, to the point where it becomes harmful.
Yeah exactly, I don’t get it either.
With “Toxic Masculinity” it’s pretty clear how masculinity - which is not a problem in itself - can become over-applied to the point where it’s damaging both to oneself and to others.
But toxic empathy? Is it really possible to care about others too much? To try and see things from someone else’s perspective too much? I feel like it really isn’t, because there can never be enough of that in the world.
Which means “toxic empathy” is genuinely nothing more than a nonsense phrase for people who don’t wish to see or hear about any viewpoint except their own.
I’m not a believer in toxic empathy, I pretty much agree with your assessment here - just going to play devil’s advocate for a sec. If a bad actor purposefully pretended to feel a certain way to elicit empathy to influence a group, that could conceivably lead to toxic empathy.
Thinking about it, essentially what the author of the article is attempting. Projection the whole way down.
Toxic masculinity has always appeared to be a typical in group/out group thing to me.
Scammers take advantage of our empathy. If the response to the scam is empathy, that doesn’t make it toxic, it makes the attempt to take advantage of it toxic, and that isn’t empathy, but a lack of it.
There’s a form of empathy I, and I think some of my friends, experience by being raised by selfish parents. We’re hyper-aware of others’ feelings, dread upsetting anyone, and take personal responsibility for other peoples’ unhappiness (all of it, even if we didn’t have any influence).
There’s another form, that’s kind of like a complement to retribution and revenge. A person goes overboard trying to soothe their own empathy-inspired unhappiness that they to go absurd ends to address the source of unhappiness. Maybe like PETA, or people experiencing moral panic.
Another form that comes to mind is the mother from Requiem for a Dream - enablers. She knows her son is an addict, she knows that he’s constantly stealing her TV to sell for drug money, but she dutifully buys her TV back from the pawn shop every time, because she can’t say no to her son.
I suppose, taking drastic action to soothe one’s own empathy, and not addressing the real source of unhappiness, can be pretty toxic, especially when used to manipulate, coerce and sway others.
I think you have a misguided sense of what empathy entails. Empathy is the ability to recognize another person’s feelings and to understand how their life circumstances and experiences influence those feelings. Acting out of empathy is selfless, is motivated by a desire to help someone else. Empathy is not self-preservation or self-soothing, though there is nothing inherently wrong with preservation or soothing as motivations.
Your first example is an anxious response rooted in past trauma; you are hyperaware of the other person’s feelings, yes, but you aren’t taking their perspective into account. You’re still in your own shoes (albeit children’s shoes) and exhibiting a trained response to other’s emotions designed to de-escalate a situation you read as dangerous. That is an act of self-preservation and is motivated by a desire to redirect and defuse emotions you feel threatened by, to ensure your own safety.I don’t fault nor judge you or anyone for acting this way but those actions do not stem from empathy.
I’m not entirely sure how to interpret ‘empathy-inspired unhappiness.’ I think I’m familiar with the concept you’re aiming for; I feel a sense of injustice and unhappiness when seeing people who have been failed by society, with homeless people and their children as the most apparent example. The action I have taken to improve the lives of those who have fallen between the cracks that I perceive as motivated by empathy has been to share food with them. I don’t have much money myself and I recognize that money (in some cases) may be used to enable behaviors that are ultimately damaging to the individual, but everyone needs to eat.
The examples you gave, however, read as reactions designed to assuage personal guilt (PETA) and fear (moral panic), not as responses driven by an understanding of others feelings and history. That leads into ‘action to [self-]soothe’ - this is a selfishly motivated reaction as well. Coercion and manipulation are inherently self-serving tactics of influencing the emotions of others as well. Empathetic actions stem from desire to improve another person’s circumstances, not from a need to feel better about yourself. The mother buying her TV back from the pawn shop is a little closer to the mark, I think. While her motivations come from a place of love, however, her actions are misguided and ultimately only serve to mitigate conflict rather than improve her son’s real circumstances. The addict’s mother, the PETA fanatic, even the person reacting to a perceived fraying of morality are not (necessarily) devoid of empathy but their actions are not motivated by empathy, either. Self-preservation is instinctual, a reaction engrained by millenia of evolution and is not an inherently bad or negative emotion. Empathy requires overcoming that instinct in order to act in a way that improves the circumstances of other people.
You are not bad for trying to de-escalate or appease those around you; those reactions were taught and reinforced by people who were utterly unconcerned with anyone’s well-being but their own. Their actions lacked consideration for their victim’s feelings or the circumstances leading their victims to those feelings. Their actions were borne entirely from a selfish desire to get ahead at the expense of those around them.
Empathy tends to require some form of self-sacrifice and always requires you to (briefly) hold someone else’s interests above your own. Empathy is acting to improve someone else’s life. I refuse to believe that actions motivated by a desire to actually help those around us, even and especially at the expense of our own comfort, is toxic. Those proclaiming the toxicity of empathy have likely never experienced actual selfless empathy and those who shout the loudest against it almost always have self-interest as their core motivation.
My experience with empathy is that empathy isn’t an act, it’s an emotion. Your descriptions track more closely with charity, heroism and justice - behaviors that are certainly closely linked with empathy. But I’m confident that the best definition of empathy explicitly does not include behaviors.
On a tangent, it’s incredibly self-destructive to take ownership of others’ feelings, especially negative ones. To support my statement, it’s predicated on empathy, but exhibits non-constructive behaviors.
there can conceivably be toxic forms of empathy.
certainly aren’t toxic when they’re based in empathy and compassion
Pick a lane? I mean no offense, but I did kinda feel like I had a stroke trying to follow your argument.
The way I see it, “toxic empathy” is self contradicting, which is a regular tactic of fascist propaganda. The whole point is to interfere with the listeners’ ability to approach their argument with reason and logic, leaving them more vulnerable to emotional manipulation.
Anyway, I’ll just go ahead and say it: no, there is no such thing as “toxic empathy”. It’s a meaningless word salad to dress their appeal to emotion up to look like some kinda of reasoned argument (but only if you don’t look to close, which of course a radical will do everything to avoid).
Not really making an argument, just want to speak precisely.
Empathy used to justify or enable harmful actions is toxic. Like, say, people who use at an excuse for retribution, or people who do something harmful to soothe their own empathy, or people who enable another’s toxic activities out of empathy.
Empathy and compassion aren’t very well-defined, but I have always understood empathy to be about sharing in another’s feelings, good or bad. Compassion is a little more distanced, it’s about understanding another’s feelings and simultaneously being considerate about it.
Empathy can be very powerful, and introduce feelings and emotions into someone who doesn’t know how to deal with them well.
BTW I’m not trying to make a case against empathy, not at all. But I think about empathy and compassion a lot, and while I still want to champion them as virtues, they can be just as complex and subtle as any other human experience. I think our lack of nuanced understanding of empathy and compassion is a root cause of a lot of human problems, especially recently.
Toxic empathy is when you try to see the good in people when there’s no conceivable good to be found. For example, the fools who think Nazis can still be brought around to reason instead of culled.
I legit felt my brain cells dying reading this!
If toxic masculinity is destructive masculinity like “boys be boys” and neofascist pundits, then toxic empathy would be something like Stockholm-syndrome. In context it does sound more like the expression stems from sociopathy.
If it’s pulling someone to the left, it can’t be toxic. Also, if the headline is a question, it’s not a sign of quality. (One point for Betteridge’s law of headlines.)
The notion that there are no toxic entities on the left is naive.
Oh believe me, I know firsthand. But empathy isn’t the problem
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There’s this article about the UK Socialist Workers party trying to hush it up when one of their leaders was accused by multiple women of rape and sexual harassment.
Extremism exists on all sides. I shouldn’t have to cite a source for you to understand that making absolute statements is naive and more often than not, incorrect.
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I’ve been called a name! Oh no…
But I didn’t say or imply that. I mean, a bit of a pull to the left isn’t a bad thing. Drfinately not toxic. I’d rather have untetherd people drift towards political or economic leftism than the alternative, which is cruel stuff like fascism etc…
I can’t really find a better way to phrase it, but I could see an excess of empathy leading to some toxic behaviors. my SiL frequently goes to a church where people “give 'till it hurts” and then next week is the one begging people to help. because they gave away all their savings the week before, and now can’t afford the medical procedure they got lined up next week.
The issue here is that a little financial responsibility would have saved everyone from being in that position in the first place. collectively, the issue is they have no impulse control and a priest taking advantage of it.
Sounds more like manipulation, when the other comment said it can weaponized, I’m assuming he meant manipulation, which is deceptive and not empathy at all, and that is what sociapaths use
How did “boys will be boys” go from “coming home at age 7 covered in mud, with a skinned knee, and a frog in your pocket” to “sexual assault and felony gun possession?”
Even in the first one, ‘boys will be boys’ is often used to explain why you react differently to the same scenario depending on whether it’s a boy or girl. I remember being scolded for this stuff as an AFAB, while boys got away with it. Same story with getting into little physical fights, being rowdy, aggressive, destroying stuff. I guess that can be a slippery slope into the latter one, if you keep it up long enough. Just my attempt at an explanation.
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While you’re not wrong about the double standard, the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy for a reason. Consider pranks; just because you do something harmless, like the old cliche of a whoopie cushion, doesn’t mean it’s okay or inevitable to escalate until you’re harassing people on YouTube or endangering people because “it’s just a prank bro.”
That’s puberty for you! 🤷🏻♂️
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Some of us heard our own parents use the phrase to dismiss innocent childhood shenanigans. If people have been using it to dismiss assault since the 80s (which is possible, I’m not doubting that), there were still plenty of people through the 90s and 00s that didn’t use it that way.
What I don’t understand is, if OP wasn’t exposed to that use of the term and/or didn’t realize it at the time (perhaps due to being a child), how does that make them a “shit human being”? Is everyone who doesn’t know everything a “shit human being”? Because if so, I’ve got some bad news.
That’s a bit much. I think you’re scolding the wrong person.
Anger is a bitch.
The line is “Anger is a gift” actually.
I would say that empathy should be a basic requirement for any political office in a democracy. Anyone who lacks empathy is simply unsuitable, because you have to be able to put yourself in the voters’ shoes in order to fulfill your mandate as an elected representative of the people.
Empathy would also be highly desirable in business leaders, as the purpose of the economy is to serve society and distribute goods at least somewhat fairly.
In our dark times, however, when politics and business mainly serve to maintain the power of those who are already powerful, it is hardly surprising that someone who is interested in doing just that propagates such idiotic ideas as “toxic empathy.”
empathy should be a basic requirement for any political office in a democracy
Empathy should be a basic requirement for participation in society, period.
The whole concept of a social contract is based (and dependant) on empathy.
You lack empathy, you get put into a mental hospital to get it fixed, and to prevent you from harming others and society in general.
If your case is currently incurable (probably because it’s not acquired but due to some as yet unfixable brain malformation), you get taken care of as well as possible for the rest of your life (or until a cure is developed), but prevented from ever interacting with society.
This alone would fix most of humanity’s problems.
Toxic empathy can only harm the person who has it. In truth you have to be a little selfish. The trouble with anyone who thinks empathy is really toxic are the ones who are too selfish.
You gotta be “me first.” But you can also realize that other people deserve to be happy and healthy, and sometimes you can sacrifice for them.
I did the volunteer EMT thing for a number of years, but I think I was always selfish. I felt accomplished, I felt connected with my community, I thought I was doing good things. So it was all these good feelings that drove me to keep doing it, and a nice fringe benefit was that I helped people.
As a person of lower 1 to 1 empathy, overly empathetic people are similar to the toxic positivity people. Very off putting. But that isn’t really how they are using toxic empathy in this case. So fuck em.
Could you define how overly empathetic people act?
That is a tough one. But it is similar to the toxic positivity people. They are so empathetic, and talking about it all the time that it feels fake. Thier empathy becomes thier whole personality instead of just a trait. I think that is the best I can do.
But what you describe is not an empathic person, but someone with poor boundaries and maybe a fragile ego. That’s not the same.
The same is usually true of people with toxic positivity. Both are describing outward behavior, not internal reality.
It is. And I would really like, if people would nuance it more. Calling something empathy when it’s clearly not, or positivity, when it’s clearly not, is just confusing everyone.
That’s a very fair point. In my mind though, when you put toxic in front of it, you are kinda saying that it isn’t the real thing. But that is kind of a weak modifier.
It is a weak modifier, but I get your point. I just see a lot of people (often without empathy) using it to attack empathetic people. Especially the right wing in a lot of countries, are trying to tarnish good and ethical words, so that you can’t use those against their hate and violent speech and actions.
Religion. The only mental illness not in the DSM.
Don’t forget to add the fascism subtype.
Literally every religion is in that subtype, so it’s a bit redundant.
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You never heard about the sex cults and weed smokers.
All the genocides, wars, slavery, and ordained atrocity from every brand of faith kind of makes me feel otherwise.
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Nobody ever ran a totalitarian regime, started a war, caused a genocide, or justified rape and slavery due to the easter bunny.
Also, religion is tantamount to believing in the easter bunny.
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The not-shark makes a valid point
When one person believes a delusion, it’s schizophrenia. When millions do, it’s religion
I often wonder if the combination of schizophrenia and heat stroke explains why so many religions started in deserts.
that’s… wow. I had never considered that before!
Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials:
“In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Did he conclude whether those people started without empathy or just lost it due to the things they did?
He did not. But it’s most likely both.
I think a good number of them have it educated out of them, by growing up in an environment where empathy is actively discouraged and portrayed as a negative trait.
There’s also conditional empathy, where you’re taught that there are certain groups to whom empathy doesn’t apply (or that empathy only applies to your group), or applies to a lesser extent (e.g., your pet dog deserves empathy — unlike the neighbours’ —, but that empathy only extends to taking it behind the shed and shooting it, not to paying for a veterinarian to take care of the minor problem it’s suffering from).
For those who might want to know what she means by that phrase, here’s the full interview (archive). It’s… certainly a viewpoint.
TL;DR
if compassion leads to affirming trans rights, understanding racism, or treating asylum seekers like humans, it’s “toxic"
Its toxic because allowing one’s self to have such empathy would cause one to question Christian dogma and thus it must be toxic. Rigid conformity must be maintained at all costs.
You know who I blame? Jesus. Going round teaching people to care about one another regardless of creed and colour. His toxic empathy has really ruined Christianity.
teaching
This
There is the biblical Christ, then there is alt-right Christ. One may, or may not, have existed as some weird combination of avatar/son/whatever of God. Then there is corruption and propaganda on the other side.
I’m not a Christian, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was raised in the south and my grandma taught Sunday school. I had read the bible cover to cover before most other chapter books, though against my will. Grandma also believed in the corrective powers of The Switch. So, yeah.
The biblical Christ would, if he were still entombed, be rolling in his grave over what the current GoP party is espousing as Christianity.
Of course, this post involves suspension of disbelief, so its all in the hypothetical sense.
Empathy can be weaponised. For instance u can weaponise empathy for the few to prevent good for the majority.
That doesn’t really sound like empathy…?
I’m guessing that I’m not fully understanding your position.
The way I see it, empathy can absolutely be exploited. But that’s not the same as weaponized.
Conservative Christians are fundamentally incapable of understanding the concept of a social contract in a pluralistic society. They’ll console themselves with the belief that empathy is a sin whilst stepping on our necks with the authority of the state.
They’re SO DAMN CLOSE TO ACTUALLY BEING SELF AWARE
And yet so very far
Their understanding is asymptotic
